


An Answering Harping

by Callie_Quite_Contrary



Category: Riddle-Master Trilogy - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 22:09:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10706148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie_Quite_Contrary/pseuds/Callie_Quite_Contrary
Summary: 'Deth, how of all things do you know that shape-changer's name.''I harped with him once, years ago. I met him even before I entered the High One's service… '





	An Answering Harping

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally written in 2004 and published on LJ and Skyehawke.

Firelight painted his skin pale gold, but could not warm him; his hands lay numb and stiff against the strings of his harp. He plucked a string with one thumb. The note vanished instantly, swallowed by darkness and the low churn of waves; he closed his eyes, stretched his hands out to the fire, his harp sliding awkwardly across his lap. Heat billowed slightly against the cold edge of the wind. A faint crackle of flame braided itself into the rush and hiss of the waves, the rustle of air through grass and sparse leaves, the night. He leaned forward.

Warmth spread across the surface of his skin, stung feeling into his fingers, teased them to want a different shape, flickering, brilliant. He leaned forward, felt the fire brush his face, calling him. The breeze tugged at him, rippled his cloak against his arms, dusted his hair across his forehead--

He closed his hands hard against the fire's call, shaped muted light behind his eyelids into a face, childish-round, pale in darkness. _Land-heir_ , said his son silently in his mind. He could see the soft shadow cast by eyelashes on a stone cheek. _What will one star call out of silence, one star out of darkness, and one star out of death? Three stars..._

His breath fell out in a harsh sigh.

He sat back, lifted his harp and resettled it as clumsily as if the fire had blinded him and he found his way by touch, not sight. His fingers fell to the strings again. After a moment, he recognised the set of them, and began to play.

It was a court dance from An, sedate, with a scatter of grace notes to lighten it. His fingers shifted dutifully through light and night-noises, built melody into ornament, elegant, fragile, lifeless. But slowly, as he played, he began to hear the echo of an older, simpler tune, and it seemed for a moment that his fingers were thicker, his hands blunt and scarred with vesta-horns--the wizard's hands--and across the fire a falcon's eyes gleamed at him in a wizard's face, gentled into a wry smile.

A change of key, a lifting note, and the song shifted and became another under his hands; he wove melody and counterpoint together against the steady slur of the waves, and it sounded, as he played, as if the water wound itself into the song too. The corner of his mouth pressed thin. He shifted into another dance, faster, glittering-bright--but the waves followed him, played the burden to his melody. Another song, a smiths' chant from Harte--

He flattened his hands across the strings and closed his eyes. For a long moment silence echoed out like a challenge, swallowed the fire's voice, the wind, the waves. Then, faintly, he heard it--not waves, but harping, slow single notes, deep and full, that rippled suddenly, flawlessly, into shining melody. His stomach clenched. He came to his feet with his harp pressed tight against his chest, searching the dark urgently.

For a moment he could see nothing but stars--stars, the still dark outlines of dunes and stunted trees against the night sky. Then a shell-pale gleam swam out of the glitter of spindrift and shifting water, turned towards him.

His face drained cold. He stood frozen, his cloak rippling about him, as the shape drifted out of night at the edge of the firelight and became a man wrapped in a robe like a Herun lord's, carrying a harp of pale bone in his arms. A harpist.

The harpist sank down across the fire in a billow of sea-coloured cloth, tipped his face up to look across the flames, and smiled a long, enigmatic smile. He knew the shape of that smile, the wry mouth, the half-closed eyes, the dark hair that shifted and tangled into the night on the wind. He closed his eyes against the sight, sharply.

'I've watched you. Little harpist.' It was a voice out of memory, low and amused, perfect on the note. His breath caught at the sound of it. 'Riding up and down the roads of the realm.' He opened his eyes. One long hand loosed itself from the bone harp, opened toward him; briefly, firelight gilded a narrow palm. 'Harp.'

He was cold to his bones, and his breath would not fill his lungs. His hands shifted blindly, protectively, on his harp. The smile across the fire deepened; sudden heat built in his face, and he dropped his eyes. Light caught in scrolled carving, flickered over his hands where they clenched on the wood; watching it, he found a semblance of calm. He drew a slow breath, let it go, looked up and bowed his head courteously, as he would to a King. Then he sank back to his place in the sand and settled his harp. His hands slid against burnished strings, found a song in them. He began to play.

It was a simple piece, a cradlesong from Hed; he watched the fire as he played, and when the song ended and he looked up, fire stayed in his eyes like a shield. Beyond it, he heard a soft, indefinable sound. Cloth shifted. Fingertips rippled over strings.

The first notes hid themselves in the distant rush of the waves, but slowly a melody grew clear. It was a song of the sea, and it pulled at him like a tide, pulled his shape toward something else. His breath grew ragged. He closed his eyes, curled his hands around the frame of his harp. Carved lines pressed gently against his skin, holding it to its shape; baulked, the song faded, sank itself in the waves again and vanished.

He eased his hands from his harp, looked up into mocking eyes and a secretive, one-sided smile. It took an effort to summon his voice into his throat and speak as if he did not know what that secret was.

'I thought I knew all the great harpists of the High One's realm,' he said at last, heard the words soft and slightly breathless over the mutter of the fire. 'You harp like Yrth did, before Lungold fell.'

'Yrth.' The dark head tilted, a sharply familiar movement. 'The Harpist of Lungold. I remember him.'

He leaned forward, fed a twig or two to the fire. His hands trembled, just a little. He drew a steadying breath, and went on: 'I studied at Lungold, before the destruction of the School of Wizards. I learnt from him.'

One dark eyebrow arched. 'And what did you learn in the city of the wizards--harpist?'

He felt a faint, indefinable pressure against his mind, the urge to remember, Lungold, the wizards, Yrth…he traced a fingertip lightly along the curve of his harp, and filled his thoughts with the smooth grain of wood under his skin, the warmth of the fire on his face. 'Harping, mostly,' he said mildly. 'A little mind-work--Talies taught me that.'

The pressure slid away from his mind, and dark eyes hooded meaningfully at him across the fire. He bent his head to his harp again to escape the look. This time he chose a dance from the Herun hills, full of complicated rhythms, and as he played he called into his mind his last days in Herun, the Morgol's courtiers pacing and swirling to his harping, bright shapes in their rich loose gowns. The harpist from the sea took his answering tune out of the fire, a complex flicker of sound, bright and warm in the chill breeze--

And the fire answered him as he played, brilliant threads loosing themselves from wood to shape a pattern against the night darkness, delicate as gold lace--the pattern of the dance out of his mind. It trapped his eyes; he sat watching, breathless, cold chasing down his back into his bones. Then the harpsong melted into the night, and the fire sank, and became bright tongues licking up from a nest of twigs again. The harpist looked up at him with bland eyes.

He drew a breath, and sat back. 'Is it a riddle-game? I'll give answer for answer.' His throat was tight. It was hard to keep his voice steady, his hands quiet on his harp.

The long mouth quirked oddly. 'I saw you there, in the college at Caithnard. You who had learnt from wizards, before Lungold fell.'

He tilted his head, almost a shrug. 'I never had much talent for wizardry, but I had some, at least, for riddlery. I took the Black before I left.'

Silence. The fire crackled faintly, ate up out of its twigs a little. Slowly, the harpist's lips pursed. 'So, the little harpist is a riddle-master. I will surely not try to riddle with you.'

A faint laugh shook through him. 'Really?' he said lightly. An appreciative gleam sparked in the harpist's eyes; he bent his head to it in acknowledgement, brushed his fingers loosely across harp-strings, searching them for the right reply... Then a minor harmony caught his memory, and he knew; he straightened, and began to play. Slow chords, a broken melody, dissonances that jarred like sobs, themes that built and vanished half-made… He heard a quick, uncertain movement over the fire's crackle, saw, distantly, long hands lift through firelight to cradle the bone harp close. Slowly, he wound fragments together into a mournful whole, a single clear theme that faded even as it came clear.

This time, the silence was longer. He watched the face across the fire steadily as fine brows eased out of a frown into expressionlessness. The rush of wind and waves ate at his ears.

At last the harpist spoke, on a casual, curious note. 'I have never heard that before.'

'I composed it not long after the destruction of Lungold.' He shifted his harp in his lap. 'I don't play it often.'

There was a restless movement beyond the fire. 'Lungold. Wizards died that day--Nun, Yrth, Talies. Ghisteslwchlohm. And you survived.'

'Yes.' He lowered his eyes, bowed his head, before the challenge. 'I have never found out why. Perhaps it was luck--chance. Perhaps whatever destroyed Lungold found me too insignificant to bother with.' He reached up a hand to pull his cloak closer about his shoulders, as if memory made him colder.

'Perhaps,' said the harpist darkly, and bent his head, and began to play.

He froze with his fingers still clenched in cloth, the breeze tugging his cloak into new shapes around him, tangling his hair against his cheek. The tune was quick and fluid, like bright wavelets dancing on a morning shore, and it called to him until his heart ached to shape its patterns...

Unfrozen by silence, he freed his hand and answered obliquely, with a robust traders' tavern-song he had learnt on the road north from Caerweddin. A slow smile twitched at long lips across the fire as he played. They traded songs in silence for a while, after that--songs taken from the wind chasing across the sky or the cry of a night-bird, answered with miners' chants learnt from Sol of Isig, round dances from Osterland, his own compositions. Then came a sudden shining torrent of notes, flawless, that made his breath catch in his chest and his fingers slide shaking from the strings of his harp as he reached for them.

After a long moment, he found another answer. He set his harp aside, pushed himself slowly to his feet. Muscles pulled and ached along his back as he turned away from the fire, crouched to fumble though his pack. He found a cup and a skin of Osterland mead, filled the cup neatly, and rose again to hold it out across the fire.

Dark eyes glittered up at him from under heavy lids, an odd, baulked look. Slowly, the harpist reached up. Long bony fingers brushed his knuckles, curled around carven wood. He loosed the cup. The harpist leaned back carelessly on one hand, tipped back his head and drained the cup in one swallow, long hair tangling over his shoulders like smoke. He took the cup back with a cold hand, turned away; as fingers chased over harp-strings behind him, he refilled it and took it back to the fire to drink.

Then the harpist launched into a tune, and he nearly choked on the first swallow--he had written it for a country wedding in Aum, half a century ago. When he looked up from coughing, the dark eyes were laughing at him across the fire. He set aside the cup half-empty, brushed his face dry with the cuff of his sleeve and answered with a quick, careless improvisation. And so it went, back and forth across the fire, he sending songs he had played for Kings to vanish and die beyond the circle of firelight, and being answered with songs no King would ever hear.

Then he played a dance from Anuin; and when he brought it to its close the harpist out of the sea caught its theme, elaborated it into a new tune, a carelessly perfect challenge. He heard a counterpoint unplayed in the song, and as the other harp quieted, he set it out alone, built another dance around it. The harpist out of the sea echoed his final chords, modulated them into a minor key, a new song that still held shifting echoes of the old. In turn, he took it up and smoothed it into a delicate, simple melody. As his hands shifted through the light, plucked peace out of the strings, he felt his face ease into unfamiliar, open lines. The harpist tipped his head, looked at him curiously from behind a knot of dark hair; then light touched his eyes, and he gave a slow blink and smiled, oddly peaceful. For a moment, silence grew around them, soft and unthreatening, shaped by the crackle of the little fire and the shift of leaves in the night-wind, the slow breath of a sleeping horse, the hush of the waves.

Then the harpist began again, with a song that must be his own, and it was he who caught the theme and wove it into something new. It went on for longer, this time; somewhere beyond the music, his ear registered the rising dawn chatter of birds, but when his hands slid from the strings at last and he straightened his back, he looked in a moment's confusion at the ashes of his fire, the morning sea-mist wreathing around him. The harpist out of the sea followed his gaze to the lightening sky, looked back at him. The mocking glint surfaced again in the heavy-lidded eyes.

'I have kept you playing too long.' His voice was still low, its edge unmuffled by the mist.

He shook his head. 'I have played longer.'

'Still.' A loose shrug. Long hands reached for the bone harp. In the mist, it shone like mother-of-pearl. 'You will have some payment for your sleepless night,' the harpist said, and began again to play again.

He knew the song at once: twice the ages could not have scoured it from his memory. He closed his eyes resolutely, bowed over his harp, sank his mind into the feel of sand under his ankles, the sound of waves on the shore, the brush of mist against his cheek. But it was useless. The song called him into memory. Voices he knew shifted like wraiths around him; he heard a woman's laugh, felt a child's sleeping weight curled in his lap. He was in the city again, listening to the song the wind sang through stone, shaping himself to its harmonies...

Then the music changed, grew harsh. He lifted his head, slowly against the weight of bitterness in his ears, stared through reddening mist at a face drawn tight with pain, fingers scattering rage across the land in notes that burned in his mind and stung tears into his eyes. He heard a fierce unrestraint battering against the binding of the melody, a building of notes like waves that built and thundered against the shore ahead of a storm. His breath clotted in his throat and he sat frozen, waiting, his mind full of that storm, his eyes full of flashing fingers, a long mouth taut in a face turned to stone by grief--

Then the sun broke over the horizon, flung streaks of fire across the sky, and the storm broke. Bitter notes flooded across his mind, soaked into the earth like brine and clung there with a longing as harsh as tears. His hands clenched on the frame of his harp, tightened until his knuckles were white knots of pain. Then the song changed again. Sour notes crept in, faded; the tune ebbed wearily, dragged his heart like the tide into silence.

His breath was harsh in the stillness, the drifting bloody mists. Slowly, he reached up a hand, brushed his fingertips over his eyes. Something moved beside his face--thin cloth, the colour of the sea. A hand slid over his shoulder. He looked up, saw the harpist's face as if for the first time: the flexible mouth and half-closed eyes, the long line of the jaw, black hair twisting in a bitter tangle into mist and wind.

He reached up a hand, closed his fingers around strong bones.

'Tell me your name...' Grief unstrung his voice in his throat; the words were almost lost in the mist that drifted between them. 'Tell me?'

The harpist's face stilled. For an instant, his expression was stripped of irony. A faint, remembered gentleness surfaced in the half-lidded eyes; the grief burning at his heart leaped at the sight of it.

'Corrig,' said the harpist, and his voice was soft, edgeless. The hand curved tighter against his shoulder. 'And you. Little harpist. What is your name?'

A word jumped into his mouth; he swallowed it painfully before it could be spoken, shook his head, drew a breath that burned his throat like tears. 'I am Deth,' he said, and at the sound of the word he looked down again, at the harp he held, his hands, the sand below his thigh. There was a moment of silence. Then the mist quivered around him; he looked up quickly, saw a laugh shake its way out of Corrig's eyes, harsh, private, shake him out of his shape into wraiths of mist that drifted and turned briefly about him and sank away under the sun's light into the sea, and left him alone with his name.

The sun crept over the horizon. Clearing light turning the mist pearl-coloured around him, thinned it to wisps. Slowly he raised his fingers to his mouth, breathed warmth into them, settled his harp against his shoulder. He played a scale, tightened a string to the note with an odd detachment. Then his hands, moving through the pain in his breast, found a chord. A note. A melody, and he was standing on Wind Plain again with the stones of the city splintered around him, the wind keening in his ears, tearing at his hands, his hair, cracking his cloak around his shoulders, scouring the tears from his eyes. His hands were raw from the burying. His mind was stone. And beneath his feet, the dead--so many dead--

The song spilled from his hands, grief-stricken, angry. He felt, distantly, the same battering against restraint that he had heard in Corrig's song; but he would not let this storm break. Discords and broken phrases flung themselves at the unhearing land, fell away and were eaten by the unceasing drum of the sea, until at last they wearied into minor harmonies. Truncated phrases softened, blurred together into a lament; harmonies bled away from it and left the single line of melody alone in the morning.

His hands slid against the strings, muffling them.

Around him the world was silent, but for the waves, the shift of grass and leaves on the warming breeze, the faint harsh cry of a sea-bird, the restless stamp of his horse behind him--the endless soundless movement of an infinity of minds. He got to his feet, and stood for a moment, stiffly, his harp cradled against his chest like a sleeping child. His feet were numb. He stumbled as he turned away from the ashes of the fire; his eyes wandered over horse, saddle, harp-case and wine-skin as if he could not recognise what he saw. Then his eyes cleared, and the weight of pain sank back to its accustomed place at the base of his heart, and the High One lifted his head, and straightened his back, and went to put his harp in its case and saddle his horse, and continue the long ride south toward Hlurle.

END.


End file.
